The Hero of this Book (Hardback)

Elizabeth McCracken (author)

£14.99

Hardback 192 Pages
Published: 26/01/2023

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Synopsis

A beautifully bittersweet meditation on the mother-daughter bond, McCracken's wryly funny and big-hearted novel finds a writer pondering the moral responsibility of committing her mother's remarkable life story to paper.

Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book walks across London on a quiet Sunday. The city was a favourite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.

The woman, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary - her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties - and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother's nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.

The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that surprises at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.

Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781787334281
Number of pages: 192
Weight: 277 g
Dimensions: 204 x 138 x 22 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

Into a single, most singular novel, McCracken fits everything we adult daughters know and feel and love and fear about our beautiful, complicated mothers, and could never say. A sublime gift. - Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss

What could be better value than a book set over one day that you can read in one day, but that will stay in your heart and refuse to go... One of the greatest memoirs of a parent. - The Times

Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity. - Guardian

Easily one of the best novels (or is it actually a memoir?) that will be published this year... It is touching and funny, and full of sharp-eyed observations about family life and parents and how your childhood forms you. - The Times

A more loving and moving tribute to its subject is hard to imagine. - Guardian

One of my favorite contemporary novelists... The Hero of This Book is funny, it’s sharp, the sentences are beautiful. - Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here

Her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down... With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love. - New York Times

The question of what this work is - a novel or a memoir, a fiction or a fact - can’t be answered. Doesn’t matter. The Hero of This Book is tender, funny, heartbreaking, philosophical. Elizabeth McCracken is a writer who always delights, and this is an exhilarating book. - Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

This story is a tribute to how great writing can elevate any subject. - Sunday Times, Summer Reads of 2023*

How reassuring it is to have writers like Elizabeth McCracken among us... One of those fleet-footed writers who will never be trapped, or even reliably tracked, by aboutness... Her speciality is the interior, and the interior is vast. We must bring our own compasses, emotional and aesthetic. - Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose